


Two Broken Weapons

by NiteWrighter



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Kind of an origin story for Widowmaker and Hanzo joining overwatch, One-Shot, Suicide mention, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:22:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28031580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NiteWrighter/pseuds/NiteWrighter
Summary: When Widowmaker's health and performance start heavily deteriorating from Talon's treatments, Talon sends her on a mission to assassinate Hanzo Shimada.Hanzo Shimada has killed every assassin sent after him, but he is tired. He is so very tired.Done for a prompt on Tumblr.
Relationships: Hanzo Shimada/Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix
Comments: 5
Kudos: 36





	Two Broken Weapons

This mission was her last chance.

If Hanzo wasn’t going to be Talon’s key to acquiring the Shimada clan, then that loose end needed to be cut if they were going to move forward in their dealings.

And Talon sent her in here like an indifferent older sibling handing off a worn down toy rather than be the one to break it.

She convinces herself she’s still the assassin they made her to be (they designed her to do that.) She ignores the random high pitched ringing in her ears, her general lack of appetite somehow mutating into full-blown nausea, the hesitation and shake to her muscles. Stupider. Clumsier. It takes seconds longer than it should to assemble her rifle. The infrasight on her visor helps her track him down, establish multiple vantage points. He’s just making his way through the underbrush, unawares he’s flying into her web like so many other victims. She could see the way he carries himself through her scope, sure-footed, practiced, a full-body-awareness she knows well, but coupled with a melancholy that seems to heave its weight onto every movement. She almost feels charitable fixing her sights on him. Don’t worry, Scion, it will be over before you even know what’s happened.

It should have been one shot. Was it her vision doubling? Was it the shake of her arms? Why did the gun feel so much heavier than normal? Did she have him in her crosshairs or did she just convince herself of that? It doesn’t matter. The wood on a tree trunk next to his head splinters with her shot and his head immediately jerks in her direction.

The mission just got a lot longer. A lot messier. He draws a bow off of his back and dodges into some bushes.

She would be fine with this. She would be patient, as she has been patient on so many missions before, but there is darkening at the periphery of her sight. She thinks of wood rotting in spring thaws. Stone cracking as water freezes and unfreezes in its fissures, but this is the mind blurring, more time passing than it should, and she tries to re-focus on the mission. An arrow whistles through the thick jungle air and she’s forced to grapple to a new perch. The muscle memory alone is enough to get her through it, but she’s unsure how much she can trust her automatic reactions. 

They hunt each other for hours. It’s more silent, more tedious than anyone would expect. To fire is to give away one’s position, so there’s long stretches of time (they are long stretches of time, aren’t they?) that are filled with only the desperate scanning of dark jungle shrubbery while trying to make one as small and unseen a target as possible. But then, all the problems that had brought her to this point start bubbling up again. Vision blurring, time stretching and contracting, her heart straining against everything Talon had done to it. Talon had been putting her in freezing cold suspended animation between missions to try and slow the effects of their own experiments on her, but here in the heat of the jungle, all those efforts seem to melt. She didn’t feel the cold, she always said, but she can feel herself coming apart here. There’s too much shake in the barrel. She keeps her focus on him throughout all of it. She’s on a well-camouflaged platform up in the trees when his arrow grazes her cheek and that flare of adrenaline throughout her whole system burns her out and her vision goes black.

She’s unsure how much time has passed. It had to be only a few minutes–seconds, even, where she’s scrambling out of the darkness, trying to claw her way back to consciousness.

The humidity of the jungle lingers like a fever sweat on her cold skin. She feels his callused knuckles on the inside of her cheek and something hard and sharp digging into her left molar pulling her back into consciousness. She grunts a little as she feels something come loose from her tooth and the hands still, only momentarily, before quickly withdrawing from her mouth. Her eyes blearily open long enough to see his moonlit silhouette examining the cyanide capsule Talon stored in her tooth. His mouth is tight and tugged down at the corners as he examines the option he has just taken from her. He looks so tired. She wonders briefly if he’ll just pop it into his mouth right there. His nostrils flare with a resigned exhale as he flicks the cyanide capsule off into the darkness of the jungle’s shrubbery.

“It’s not that easy,” he says quietly before darkness sweeps over her again.

—

She wakes up under bright fluorescents and a soft whirring fan. There’s an industrial air conditioner humming somewhere, but the building must have poor circulation because the fan is only pushing the stuffy air of the room back down on her. She tongues the gap in her molar, and then realizes her head feels lighter. Her hair is down and spilling out over the sides of her little clinic cot. Her visor–her hand clumsily pulls up to feel for her visor. No–no gun–the rifle is gone. Something itches on her skin. She glances down to see a tacky Numbani Heritage Museum tee shirt hastily yanked over her jumpsuit. Her eyes flick up to the only other human figure in the room. He’s clearly feverishly scrubbed off the mud of the jungle in the bathroom, but the scent of sweat and blood and rotting earth still sticks to him.

“What…?” she starts woozily.

“You’re in a clinic in Nonthaburi,” he says, pushing up from his chair, “They managed to provide enough biotics to stop your organs from shutting down, I grabbed what extras I could, but I would say we have 15 more minutes until law enforcement comes here.”

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I don’t know yet,” he says, looking out the window. 

“…you took my capsule,” her voice drops to a hiss.

“We both still have things we need to answer for,” he says. He opens the window, “You’re in no condition to fight. Our only option is to keep moving.”

“Talon will come for me,” she says, her eyes narrowing.

“Then by all means,” he says, nimbly slipping out the window.

She pushes off the cot and stumbles as her boots hit the floor. Stupid, sluggish, weak. She’s the opposite of everything she should be right now. She can’t go back while he’s still alive. She sways and it takes an embarrassing amount of focus just to stay upright. She stumbles toward the window. A hand extends to her through the window frame and her face twists up in disgust. He’s waiting for her, out on the fire escape.

“I don’t need your help,” she says, swatting the hand aside. The hand withdraws back out and she braces her own hands on the window frame.

She falls. Her shoulder flares with pain and the fire escape rattles beneath her, enough to wake the whole town. She glances up and there’s his hand again. A snarl falls out of her as she grips it. She wants it to hurt, but he doesn’t react at the tightness of her grip.

“I _am_ going to kill you,” she says as he hauls her up into a fireman carry and descends the fire escape. He doesn’t respond to that.

—

“I am going to kill you!” she has to raise her voice over the buzzing motor of the hovercycle he hot-wired.

He doesn’t respond to that. Apparently focusing on quickly weaving through traffic.

—-

“I’m going to kill you,” she says as they both deftly pick the security tags off of new clothes in a store with Lúcio’s latest album blasting over the speakers. Lights bloom in the corners of her vision. It’s been 4 days. He’s stolen her another batch of biotics to keep her going.

“Mm-hm,” he says before pulling a two pairs of pants off the rack, “Black or gray?”

“…Black,” she says.

—-

“I am— _urgh_ – going to kill you,” she says mid-gag as he holds her hair while she grips the toilet seat before she throws up again. It’s been 6 days. The bile feels hot in her throat. She can’t remember the last time something felt warm inside her. 

“Just breathe,” his voice is gentle.

“You’re deluding yourself doing this,” fury is leaking into her voice, maybe the bile is thawing it out from all the mood-suppressors Talon put her on, “You should have killed me. There’s nothing to save. You’re a killer and I’m a killer and that’s the only way this–” The next stream of vomit cuts off her words.

“I know,” he says, keeping a steady hand on her back as it convulses with her gags.

—

“I’m g-going to k-kill you,” her teeth are chattering as he pulls his jacket around her. She’s lost track of how many days its been. There are no cryo-sleeps to keep her mind sharp. Everything’s bleeding into everything else.

“This isn’t working,” he says, “You need a doctor who can figure out what’s going wrong.”

“Just s-s-steal me more biotics!” she snaps. His jacket stinks of him. She pulls it tight until her knuckles whiten.

“…so you can kill me?” he arches an eyebrow.

They stare at each other for a beat.

“Yes,” she says stiffly.

“We need help,” he moves to put a hand on her shoulder but she flinches back and lightheadedness bubbles up from the base of her skull with the suddenness of her own movement. She shrinks into his jacket and his hand is still extended toward her. “Please.”

“Why are you doing this?” 

“I do what I must.”

“T-that’s not an answer.”

“I’ve killed every assassin that’s come for me,” his voice lowers slightly, “I… cannot remember the last time I did something that felt like a choice and not a reflex. But this is a choice.”

“…the first assassin you choose to spare, and it’s the h-hardest assassin to keep alive,” her eyebrow arches with amusement even as shudders wrack her body, “You have shit luck.”

“…I really do,” he agrees, “You have a choice here, too,” he keeps that hand extended toward her but hesitates, knowing she might flinch back again. 

She looks down at his hand.

—-

“I’m going to kill you,” her voice is quiet from the watchpoint infirmary bed. He glances up at her, half-obscured by the multiple IV’s leading into her arm. He’s been missing half the day, his presence only confirmed by the sounds of arguments outside the little infirmary room. He’s scrubbed the stink off of himself and is wearing their odd gray and orange training jumpsuits with a dark, baggy zip-up hoodie.

“Mm,” he grunts in mild acknowledgment while frowning over the tablet one of them gave him.

“I am,” she says, turning over in the infirmary bed at him, “Talon had to have put a failsafe in. Something that’s going to make me scorch the earth before they lose me.”

“They’ve already lost you,” he says.

“You brought me to the place where I can do the most damage,” she says, turning on her back and looking up at the ceiling, “Talon had to have planned this.”

“I’m sure they meticulously planned your violently vomiting all over a Bangkok train station platform,” he replies. There’s a new exhaustion on him, his body accepting the apparent safety of his environment, but his mind pushed to its brink just by being here, “And they were definitely counting on me being a warm and charitable soul.”

A chuckle falls out of her at the idea, but it melts away as quick as the fog of breath on glass. “I’m not…meant to…have…” she doesn’t know how to finish the sentence but exhaustion is creeping back over her. Her eyelids feel heavy. She feels his callused thumb gently tuck her hair back from her temple.

“I don’t think I am, either,” he says quietly, retaking his seat.

“Two broken weapons….” her voice is fading.

“Just rest,” he says but sleep snuffs out his voice as she curls up in the infirmary bed.


End file.
